Governor Hopefuls Fencing With Polls

September 11, 1985|By Steve Neal, Political writer.

In their duel for the 1986 Democratic nomination for governor, Illinois Atty. Gen. Neil Hartigan and former U.S. Sen. Adlai Stevenson are having a little fun with public opinion polls as they try to discredit one another and advance their own causes.

Polls are ``far more a function of name ID at this stage,`` said J. Michael McKeon of Joliet, one of Hartigan`s two pollsters. ``It depends how you`re trying to set the table for your candidate.``

Hartigan fired the first shot last month by releasing a private poll that showed him edging out Gov. James Thompson, with Stevenson losing to the Republican incumbent by a narrow margin. The poll, by Democratic pollster Paul Maslin of Washington, D.C., said his survey established that Stevenson ``does not have strong loyalty to him`` and had a ``mediocre rating.``

What Hartigan wanted to prove was that Stevenson is a loser, but the poll actually showed that the Democratic contenders were in a statistical dead heat with Thompson. Stevenson`s strategists even considered mailing news reports about the poll to party leaders because it showed the former senator to be competitive in a Thompson rematch.

As Hartigan formally announced his candidacy Monday, Stevenson`s office mischievously made public a poll that suggested the former senator would wipe out Hartigan in a Democratic primary. Stevenson led Hartigan by 17 percentage points statewide and a whopping 24 percentage points in Chicago, which has about half of the state Democratic vote.

Richard Day of Evanston, a pollster who has conducted surveys for Channel 7 and numerous Democratic candidates, including Stevenson, argued that his poll indicated Hartigan`s candidacy was doomed. ``There is a greater chance of slippage for Hartigan than for growth,`` he said.

Though the Stevenson poll embarrassed Hartigan on the day of his announcement, it mainly established that the former U.S. senator is better known than the former lieutenant governor. McKeon made public a poll taken over the weekend that also showed Stevenson leading Hartigan but by a much smaller margin, and more than one-fourth of the voters were undecided.

Stevenson has been skeptical of public opinion polls since he defied them in 1982 by finishing within one-seventh of a percentage point of Thompson when polls had projected a Thompson landslide. David Axelrod, a Stevenson strategist, predicted that Hartigan will be a formidable opponent because of his incumbency and support from the Illinois and Chicago Democratic organizations.

Some Hartigan advisers tried to put a good face on the results by making the argument that the poll focused attention on Stevenson as the front-runner and showed Hartigan`s potential strength as an underdog.

Thompson got into the Democratic polling game in June during a taping of the WBBM-AM program ``At Issue`` when he disclosed that his private poll had indicated Stevenson would give him a better race than Hartigan.

At the time, Thompson was trying to ridicule Hartigan`s suggestion that he would be the toughest opponent of the governor`s career. Thompson had said the same thing several months before.

With the Democratic primary more than six months away, few political observers are placing much importance on early poll results. Even the candidates and their staffs are somewhat dubious of them. A strategist for one 1986 Democratic hopeful confided that the results of one early survey added up to 104 percent.